Mike Bald is a small business owner in east-central Vermont, and his business is the control of nonnative invasive plants. At first glance, his work is simple: he pulls weeds for customers. At a…

November 15, 1976. Late that morning I would shoot my first deer, a buck. But what I remember most about that day is a bird. Burned into my mind is the image of a northern goshawk tail-chasing a…

Late last June, we drove south from Seattle, then north, circumnavigating Puget Sound. Through occasional showers, we caught glimpses of our destination, the jagged Olympics, clothed in forest and…

The common green darner, Anax junius, is one of our largest dragonflies, measuring three inches long with a four-inch wingspread. It is strikingly colored, with a green thorax and a bright blue (male)…

“Your father smelt of elderberries,” taunts the French knight in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. And that was not a compliment. Even Euell Gibbons, the ever-optimistic…

In the summer of 2013, as part of her graduate work at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Jennifer Milikowsky was talking with small-scale landowners in northeastern Connecticut…

A few Thanksgivings ago, my then-ten-year-old daughter and I went for an afternoon stroll.  Unseasonably warm weather made for a longer than planned walk through a power line right-of-way and on…

Every so often, my friend David texts me a picture of roadkill. A fisher trailing a single strand of blood-red sinew. A wind-roused pile of porcupine quills. A bobcat in graceful, permanent repose.…

A wheelbarrow full of small chunks generated while working up a load of log-length firewood. This byproduct probably wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago. What are they and what changed?

It’s probably safe to assume that most readers of this magazine are well aware that firewood needs to be reasonably dry before it’s burned, and that it’s a pain to move, so…

The fields around our home are something of a bear buffet from mid-summer through fall: wild blueberries in July followed by blackberries, then apples come September, with beechnuts falling from the…

Writers love conflict, and so we often put religion and science in a small pen and make them fight, our readers standing around with fistfuls of dollars cheering one or the other on. There’s a…

Like a lot of hunters, I keep tabs on the deer around our camp with trail cameras that are left up year-round. This particular four-day window presents a couple of nice, teachable moments where it…

What caused this digging in the woods? Hint: The photographer took the picture from a safe distance.

A writer who’d recently had a piece of writing rejected by a magazine once told me that the experience was like walking into an interview and being asked: “I’m thinking of a number…

A Conversation with J.T. Horn of The Trust for Public Land On October 20th, about 140 writers, artists, students, and scientists will gather at the Hulbert Outdoor Center to participate in the fourth…

This time of year, I keep the windows cracked open on even marginally warm nights, savoring the sweet air that sifts through the screens. On that air comes the sound of others relishing the last bit…

For more than a quarter-century, the dawn and the trees have hardly changed at Bear Swamp. Each June for the past 27 years, which is nearly half my life, I’ve bushwhacked the same route into…

One of our big collective cultural fears about nature involves poisonous plants. Our mothers implored us to NEVER put anything from the woods in our mouths, but in reality, you can sample most of…

Except for the Minnesota black bear that chose to spend the winter hibernating 70 feet up in a bald eagle nest, North American black bears don’t hang out in tree nests. Rather, the…